


You Wonder What Happened

by Cheeto_the_Cat



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Dream Smp, Ghostbur, Ghostbur makes me sad, It's written in 2nd person pov but not really, Memory Loss, Wilbur Soot has a complicated legacy, Wilbur Soot-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:06:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27735031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cheeto_the_Cat/pseuds/Cheeto_the_Cat
Summary: If you were to wander about the Dream SMP today, and ask who Wilbur Soot was, you would get a variety of answers.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & Wilbur Soot, Dave | Technoblade & Wilbur Soot, Eret & Wilbur Soot, Floris | Fundy & Wilbur Soot, Niki | Nihachu & Wilbur Soot, Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Comments: 57
Kudos: 289





	You Wonder What Happened

If you were to wander about the Dream SMP today, and ask who Wilbur Soot was, you would get a variety of answers.

Actually, you probably wouldn’t come equipped with a name, much less a full one.

Maybe you ask who wrote the anthem, who designed the flag, or the beautiful uniforms of L’manburg. Maybe Niki excuses herself once a week to go stand by a small grave next to an old tree, and you finally work up the courage to wonder aloud who she was grieving for.

Maybe you ask why the president, traditionally, doesn’t wear armor, even if exceptions are occasionally made.

Or maybe, you simply ask who started it all.

From there you could coax a name out of one of the friendlier members, one who remembers. 

So anyways, you wander into the Dream SMP, you ask one of the aforementioned questions, coax the name out of a nicer citizen, and ask who Wilbur Soot was. You get a variety of answers. 

  
  
  


You ask the owner first, always: he will tell you that Wilbur Soot was a power-hungry villain, a tyrant coming to take the land away from innocent inhabitants. He would seem wistful as he said it, though, looking at you softly, with none of the weight you would expect for what is such an apparently infamous figure. 

You ask him why  _ it doesn’t seem like you hate him though _ , and he tells you  _ he was really good at trivia, I guess. Knew everything about geography, history, music, everything. We used to quiz each other. I miss that.  _ You wonder why the benevolent owner of such a pristine server would fraternize with such a low life, and why he would have known so much about him, and why he would fixate on such a meaningless fact.

If you ask the owner’s companions, the two of them will answer in the same vein, but it will seem rehearsed, well-practiced, as if their heart isn’t quite in it either.

Understandably, you are unsatisfied with this impression.

  
  
  


If you ask the current president next, the beekeeper, he’ll stammer and stutter and be unable to give you a clear answer. It seems like he’s trying to be nice. He’ll finish on  _ He was... a lot _ , but if you push a little further, he might let you into his archives.

He’ll excitedly show you diaries and documents, and leave you alone in the dusty storage room. You’ll wander through the shelves filled with carefully preserved discs, aquariums containing fish who appear older than anything else here, and ancient weapons that gleam with rare enchantments. At one point, you come across what appears to be a slab of cured leather, carefully hung on the stone wall, and it is not the strangest thing you’ve come across in this graveyard of memories. 

You eventually make it to the library, filled with old books and speeches from wars long past, and push back to the very beginning of recorded history. You begin to wonder why such an evil man wrote quite so much about freedom and liberty, why he spoke of breaking out against an unfair ruler if he was one himself.

You’ll read his declaration of independence and laugh at his choice of language, the image of an insidious villain drifting further and further from your mind.

He signs off as President Soot, and more pieces begin to fall into place.

You’ll read his policies, his diaries, and continue to smile at the sarcastic wit that dripped from his words, at all the inside jokes that you lack the capability to understand. This was a man with charisma, who so clearly loved his people. You wonder what happened.

You read everything he wrote, desperate to understand just what role he played, but he’s frustratingly vague and you wish he would have explained himself more. Battles and debates and elections begin to run together as though history itself cannot give you a clear image of what you seek to find.

At some point, at least once, you’ll lift an old journal and an old, fading photo will fall out. It depends which one. Sometimes, it’s a man with dark, curly hair, round glasses and a big, shameless smile as he holds a small redheaded child with fox ears up to the camera. Other times, it’s clearly a planned portrait, this curly haired man, with a much older redheaded teen and more familiar faces all saluting neatly, expressions proud and heads held high.

Maybe it’s this: the curly-haired man, who you can only assume is Wilbur, with his arm thrown around the shoulder of a blonde boy who looks awfully like the current right hand man of the president, beaming at the photographer

Or maybe: Wilbur giving a thumbs up, hands covered in grime and plaster as he turns around to look at the camera from where he’s building a wall.

Only once: the camera is turned around, clearly. The person taking the picture is a blonde girl in uniform, smiling and clearly laughing, while Wilbur presses a kiss to her cheek, glasses pushing up against her flushed skin. It feels like a private moment. It feels wrong.

You hastily shove the photo where you found it, slamming the journal shut, stomach dropping as you rush back up the stairs, back into the daylight and out of whatever personal memory you were trapped in.

You wonder what happened.

  
  
  


If you go seek out the blonde boy in the portrait, he looks far older, far more burdened. He appears to be inseparable from the president. His speech is slow and measured, but this too feels practiced, and you can feel the emotion he’s carefully restraining behind charming smiles and eloquent words. Based on what the first President said about him, and reading his own notes, you glean that he hasn’t always been this way.

He won’t meet your eyes. 

You wonder what happened.

He’ll tell you the last big puzzle piece you were looking for, not that it’ll answer any more questions than it raises. 

_ Wilbur… he went insane. Lost his mind, his nation, his family, all in one go.  _

_ He… left us. _

The language he’s using is careful, but he’s  _ angry,  _ and you can tell. You ask him what he means and like the string of a bow snapping to attention, he retreats back into the formal position of a general, detached from it all. You ask him what made him go insane, why Dream calls him a villain why those  _ pictures  _ seem so happy why is _ he  _ in them  _ who was he to you? _

_ He was my brother. _

He turns and walks forcefully away, boots clicking against the tidy cobblestone path, almost daring you to follow him. You don’t.

  
  
  


You go to the blonde girl in the picture next, the baker, and she’s as sweet as she seemed in the letters her and Wil traded. You ask her who he was, and she tells you  _ he was a close friend of mine, for a long time. Oh! He was a great musician too! He took his guitar with him wherever he went! He was always so kind, so patient.... _

She clearly doesn’t want to remember more than that, so you don’t push her.

You ask the redheaded man with the fox ears, who wrote the infamous “Diary of a Spy” you pored over, and he admits that  _ yeah, he was my dad. Adopted, of course. _

He says nothing more, no elaboration. Just  _ my dad _ . You wonder if, at the end of the day, any title or position Wilbur held was more important to this man than that one.

You wonder, as always, what happened.

  
  
  


On some days, you get lucky enough to stumble upon the anarchist. Perhaps he is stopping by for business, or to pick up supplies to bring back to his remote, icy base. Rarely, he is stopping by to visit his brother (no longer in the plural), or maybe to trade words with the baker or the beekeeper. No one has really forgiven him, but they are united in their grief and mourning of the person who was their connective tissue. They are still uncomfortably disjointed, but no one wants to ruin the still fragile peace that stretches over the world like a thin membrane, enclosing them with a sense of security they have long craved.

However, stumbling upon the anarchist is very rarely productive. Most often, he will ignore you, tell you to  _ ask someone else.  _

Sometimes:  _ Oh, y’know he was the first president… until he lost it, or whatever _

The hurt is masked behind a nonchalant tone, but it comes through in his eyes, in the stiffening of his posture, the defensive gripping of the axe on his side.

Occasionally:  _ He was the leader of us all, I guess, he pushed L’manburg into what it was today. _

Only Once: You make the mistake of calling him a bad person in front of Techno, trying to get a response out of him that isn’t a short, single-worded reply. 

_ Who told you that? _

_ Uhh, the owner, I think. The one with the mask. _

He looks over at you then, dark eyes alight with fury and for a moment he looks far too similar to the man in the pictures.

_ He’s lying. Wilbur was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a  _ bad person,  _ for God’s sake. _

He scoffs

_ He was Icarus, is what he was. Some sort of figure out of a Greek tragedy. The Gods didn’t give him wings like they did others, so he made them himself. _

_ His wings, made of his words, and his charisma, but mostly importantly:  _ wax, _ were his own downfall.  _

He startled out of the trance he was momentarily in, minutely shaking his head and grunting softly.

_ He was an idiot. _

The moment is feeling too private again, you shouldn’t be seeing this, should you? You nod vigorously, turning around and away from this figure, this figure who has spoken more words to you about Wilbur just now than he has to anyone in months.

You wonder,  _ again _ , what happened.

  
  
  


Last stop of the day. The light is quickly fading, but you aren’t ready to stop yet.

This server doesn’t have many people who still remember, but as you stand in front of a large, stone castle adorned with flags and banners of all colors, you somehow know you haven’t met them all. You always visit this place last.

The king’s face is obscured by sunglasses, but you can see the glowing aura behind them. His cloak appears long forgotten, tossed over the arm of a throne that doesn’t appear to have received much usage, his crown tossed on the top of some chest.

He doesn’t appear all that interested in ruling anymore. 

It’s sad, given that you learned all that he betrayed and relinquished for this position.

You ask, for the final time:  _ who was Wilbur Soot? _

_ You don’t already know? _

_ Not really. _

_ How much do you want to know? _

_ Everything. _

This happens everytime: you sit down at one of his tables; they have seen much more use than the throne, worn with care, scratched and faded but clearly well loved. He’ll pour you tea into a chipped mug with pale blue and pink flowers painted onto it, and finally tell you the story you wanted to hear.

He tells you how Wilbur Soot came to visit this world in a burst of energy, revitalizing a tired town with his big ideas and even bigger ambitions. He’ll tell you that the president and his friend adored him, looked at him as though he himself had hung the stars and the moon. Even the owner and his companions found him mesmerizing, a cobbled-together mess of a man who gave them songs and stories to bring home, regardless of how well he knew them.

He was generous with his words, with his music, a speech always seconds away from spilling out in defense of whoever he felt needed it.

He’ll tell you that Wilbur Soot played a good leader but he was never really meant to be one, that he was at his happiest when he was the one spitballing ideas for novels and inventions and revolutions. He was never really meant to be tied down for so long, to have so much pressure placed upon him.

He’ll tell you, without shame but with plenty of regret, of his own betrayal, and how that had changed the president. 

How Wilbur had been so confident that words were enough, that people would trust his ideals more than the wealth and power of the owner, and that in the end, it wasn’t enough. Something naive inside him broke at the realization that he people could hear him out, hear his stories, and still choose to  _ leave.  _

He’ll tell you about the peace times, where the president threw himself into improving L’manburg, so scared someone else would leave him. How in his process of trying to bring tourism to his city, of trying to create an election to consolidate power, Wilbur Soot left behind what initially made him so powerful.

Afterall, there was no time for guitar playing or storytelling with his son when he believed that if he stopped working for even a second, people would turn around and abandon him again.

The king tells the story of the election, how the king himself had tried to offer his aid but was brutally rejected by a man who could no longer trust him. He tells the story of Pogtopia, when the anarchist joins the cause and Wilbur doesn’t even try to fool himself into believing he’s loyal or actually  _ cares _ .

He tells the story of the button, of how the president lost so much faith in his words, in his once prized ideals, because the king, the businessman, even  _ his son _ , had left him. He tells you that in the end, there was no alternative in his mind other than pushing the button, because nothing he could say would stop him from ending up alone, without a voice, eventually.

You’ll ask:  _ How do you know all this? Why did he tell you this? _

And he’ll stop talking, take a deep breath, looking up and down and anywhere but at you, and you can’t see the pity in his eyes but you’ll hear it in his voice.

_ You told me. _

  
  


And you’ll smile, slightly confused, pushing your way out of the chair, stumbling over the legs, suddenly desperate to leave. 

And you’ll walk out of the castle until you can’t bear it and you start to run, the red beanie you didn’t realize you were wearing nearly falling off of your head. You’ll sprint to your small house in New L’manburg but your eyes will catch in the reflection of the small wishing well outside your house, unwillingly. 

You notice, as you always do, that you have dark, curly hair and round glasses, and realize that you look awfully familiar to the man in those pictures. 

You’ll rush down the ladder of your small house in the sewers, trying and failing to ignore the raging thoughts in your head, feeling a pit in your stomach. You would be breathing heavily if you could breath at all, and it hurts to look at the yellow sweater you’re wearing.

You need to stop, to calm down, but everything feels familiar and unfamiliar all at once and you can’t handle the mess of memories in your head.

  
  


_ He was... a lot _

  
  


_ Lost his mind, his nation, his family, all in one go.  _

  
  


_ He was my brother. _

  
  


_ Knew everything about geography, history, music _

  
  


_ a great musician  _

  
  


_ my dad _

  
  


_ a close friend _

  
  


_ He was Icarus, is what he was _

  
  


_ He… left us. _

  
  
  


You.

Wonder.

What. 

Happened.

You’re afraid you already know.

  
  
  
  


The next day arrives. 

You climb up out of your house, past the wishing well. You don’t look in it, this time. You walk past the flags that adorn your beloved city, and wonder who made them.

You wander into the Dream SMP, you ask one of the aforementioned questions, coax the name out of a nicer citizen, and ask who Wilbur Soot was. You get a variety of answers. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This was started before Ghostbur existed, and then Ghostbur existed and I thought "Huh, how could I make this even more sad and also slightly trippy". Does this fic make sense? Is it comprehendable? I don't even know anymore, but I hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> I really appreciate comments, so go crazy, I would love to hear all your thoughts. <3


End file.
